Chess game and play clock with the pieces in their initial position. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I saw this at Kids Prefer Cheese, It is a tweet from Russian chess grandmaster and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov. I’ve thought of our President as a grandmaster community organizing checkers player who got stuck playing foreign policy chess. He doesn’t think any intelligence exists beyond his own brilliance. This tweet by Kasparov shows that maybe our checker player got checkmated, or maybe he thinks he got enough political cover from Putin to come out of this smelling like a rose. We must understand he is not just playing a foreign policy chess game, he is playing this foreign policy chess game inside of what he considers a bigger and more important game, which is getting us to see him as a believable and trust worthy leader which would help him further advance his domestic agenda. Having foreign countries think of him as a strong leader on the world stage is secondary to getting a majority of us to think he is a strong leader. Winning the game against us is more important than any foreign policy weakness, or any Syrian civilian casualties that “he” says “we” can’t allow. (If he is truly worried about civilian casualties, he wouldn’t be the all time presidential leader in drone strikes resulting in civilian casualties.)
If you look at this by asking the question, who is able to think and act the greatest number of moves ahead? You would have to say the chess player Putin thinks many moves ahead of our checker player in chief, and our checker playing President is thinking many moves ahead of the tic tac toe playing public.
Here is some of Kasparov’s tweets.
A few weeks ago al-Assad was hiding in a bunker & worrying about defections. Now he feels perfectly safe and is making demands!
Dictators love a vacuum. Putin & his client al-Assad didn’t have to do anything. They just stepped into the big open space left by Obama.
Putin & al-Assad get what they wanted: status quo of them in charge, massacring all opposition. WMD are bait & Kerry/Obama eating the hook.
Putin showed up to put out a fire in Syria, smelling of gasoline and with a big box of matches in his pocket.
So America has authorized al-Assad to stay in power until this process is completed. And the process will of course be endless.
And then? Obama goes back to “negotiate” more? Forever? Is there a hotel in Geneva that Kerry is particularly fond of?
Related Article – Human Action reveals The Reality About Political Decisions, at austrianaddict.com.
Related Article – Mises’ “Human Action” Explains Lies About Libya, at austrianaddict.com.
Tags: Assad, Barack Obama, Checkers or Chess?, Garry Kasparov, Syria, Vladimir Putin
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